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Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

Visual Studio 2017 RC3 Adds .NET Core, Delays Python Support

Visual Studio 2017 saw its third Release Candidate become available last week, overcoming a minor stumble as the first attempt had some difficulties with the installer. With those issue corrected, it is now worth reviewing what has been provided with this batch of changes. (The desired build is 26127, released on January 27.)

The key areas that RC3 focuses on are NET.Core and ASP.NET Core support, Team Explorer, and bug fixes related to the Visual Studio installer. Based on comments made by Microsoft's John Montgomery, VS2017 should be nearing production release as a couple of workloads have been removed from RC3 due to insufficient time to complete localization. While the Data Science and Python Development workloads will not be available at release, F# support will remain in VS2017 via the .NET Desktop and .NET Web development workloads. Montgomery says that both Data Science and Python Development workloads will be made available post-release as separate downloads.

NET.Core / ASP.NET Core

VS2017’s support for both of these workloads has moved out of a preview state. As part of this release .NET Core project migration from project.json/xproj files to csproj is more reliable.

Team Explorer

The Team Explorer module has been updated for better speed when used with Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server.

NuGet Updated

NuGet has been updated to support <PackageReference> in WPF, WindowsForms, and UWP projects. Lightweight Solution Restore now works without having to load a project.

General Enhancements

Several bugs have been fixed in RC3, including the addition of a retry button for the installer, offline install not totally functional, and shutdown delays among others. Since the number of major changes to VS2017 has slowed, it would seem that VS2017 is nearing formal release. Now is a good time to see what VS2017RTM will look like in your environment for your specific development needs.

VS2017RC3 is available for download now. For full details, visit the release notes.